The Oregon primary is over, and Sen. Barack Obama (not surprisingly) won the Democratic race.

For reporters, like myself, it was incredibly stressful. In fact, afterwards I almost had to take a trip to the East Coast to give myself some rest.

The one redeeming thing about the primary season, was the opportunity it provided for me to provide some Oregon coverage to a national audience.

For NPR’s political desk, I covered the Oregon senate race for Morning Edition. And then this week, for the national desk, I got to report on a spate of Oregon political resignations for All Things Considered.

The especially fun part of both of those stories, were they were my first appearance on each show. As a professional aside, each new show a reporter can appear on is looked as an accomplishment.

This time in an article about Oregon’s health care lottery.

For one thing, there are a lot of Ugg boots, for another a lot shady real estate and investment deals.

But my favorite parallel is the lifestyle magazines in both places:

Bend Living and Newport Living.

(For the Bend media-niks out there, the subhed to this post is: ‘Kevin Max and Julie Cooper — separated at birth?’)

Maybe its not a good idea for Barack Obama to be the next Chuck Norris.

I stumbled onto this via a posting on a newlist for a radio production consortium. Its a phone call that President Bill Clinton made to the crazy leftist radio show Democracy Now, on Pacific public radio stations.

Now, this post isn’t a compliment towards Democracy Now, it isn’t a compliment of the policies and politics discussed by President Bill Clinton, and it certainly isn’t a compliment of the previous Administration’s intelligence and thoughtfulness versus our current Administration (a mediocre and specious argument, if you ask me).

But it is a journalist’s fond remembrance of an era when our President would engage the electorate.

On a day that the New York Times’ front-paged Jamie Lynn Spears, NPR’s Bryant Park Project (the new test morning show — call it NPR, NOW FOR FOR KIDS!) interviewed Chicago Tribune Africa correspondent Paul Salopek.

Read it, listen to it. He really does a good job of exposing why we ignore heartbreaking, world-affecting stories like the tragedy in Congo. And why we choose to care about some conflicts, instead of others.

Oregon Considered, the local news show for which I’ve been filing most of my OPB feature stories since July, will be canceled at the end of the month.

As a reporter who wants to get on air, you’d think I’d dislike the decision. But, as a reporter, I also like it when people hear my stuff. And not enough people listen to local-only news anymore. They will listen to local+national, and thats the model we’re going for now.

WNYC, New York’s NPR station, and KPCC, LA’s big NPR news station, went to this model a few years ago, and it has been both successful and well-liked. So I think we’ll see how people really feel about the switch in a couple months.